


Things You Find On The Road

by somegunemojis



Series: modern au [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Modern AU, Serial Killer, alternately titled: sai and haku discover the charms and secrets of rural appalachia together, in another life they make some friends along the way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-06 06:30:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17340311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somegunemojis/pseuds/somegunemojis
Summary: a bus, from new york city to pittsburgh, and from there, back to charleston. he gets off three stops early, in a small town in the shenandoah valley, walks to a gas station to steal a couple two-shotters of vodka, and then all the way to a bridge that overlooks a lazy, brown river. the locals don’t give him much more than a glance – the weather is cooling, he’s wearing a cap, sunglasses, a scarf and a worn coat he’d borrowed from naruto last month.





	Things You Find On The Road

**Author's Note:**

> the prompt for this was "driving for many hours through mountains" and it.... got away from me a little

               he gets out of town. 

          a bus, from new york city to pittsburgh, and from there back to charleston. he gets off three stops early, in a small town in the shenandoah valley, walks to a gas station to steal two-shotters of vodka, and then all the way to a bridge that overlooks a lazy, brown river. the locals don’t give him much more than a glance – the weather is cooling, he’s wearing a cap, sunglasses, a scarf and a worn coat he’d borrowed from naruto last month. 

          he sits on the bridge, on the railing, legs hanging over the edge while he gets drunk off his ass. the sky darkens, thirty minutes pass where he doesn’t move at all, and then he is bathed in the white-light of headlights. the old truck passes him, slows, stops. the hazards come on, just bright enough to wash him with red, and then he can hear the door open. no footsteps, but he can see the figure approaching him from the corner of his eye, coming to lean his elbows on the railing and stare into the shadows of the river below them. 

          he’s … pretty, maybe one or two years older than sai, and dressed to blend. the stranger similarly sizes him up from below the brim of his ballcap, clever eyes shining in the low light. the stranger offers him a ride, his voice is soft, and he doesn’t blink when sai says he doesn’t know where he wants to go, only replies,  _neither do i_.

          sai slides down from the railing and leans his shoulder against the stranger’s – he’s taller, and sobering up, and fairly certain he could slit his throat should he try anything, but. there’s a fighter’s grace about the man leading him back to his truck, opening the passenger door and folding him in, so, perhaps not. he disappears for a few seconds, hops into the driver’s side, turns off his flashers and puts the pickup in drive. 

          the stranger says,  _i’m haku_. no last name. the truck is warm, enough so that he has to unwind his scarf and unzip the coat, settle his forehead against the cool glass that keeps the darkness outside from spilling into the cab. his answering  _sai_  is soft, insubstantial, tired. haku sizes him up once more in the digital light of the clock on the dash, asks if he’s hungry. 

.

          they stop at a waffle house an hour later, tucked next to a gas station at the only exit they’ve seen for almost a hundred miles. haku fills his tank, leaves his truck parked at the pump while they walk inside. it’s midnight, the waitress is skeletal, and there is a man slumped at a booth next to the door with a cup of congealed coffee at his elbow. 

          without speaking, they take the booth in the corner, with a view of the door and the kitchen, seating themselves comfortably. the fluorescent lights sting at his eyes, wash all the color from him and turn him grey. he feels like the waitress looks, skin stretched too tightly over bone, too sharp, something wild and hungry and  _hunted_  lurking behind his eyes. haku doesn’t seem alarmed, takes in the scars on his knuckles, the misshapen lump of his right ring finger from an old break that never healed right, and doesn’t ask. 

          sai doesn’t ask about his scars, either, half-hidden by the dark fall of hair over his shoulder. they order coffee, and food, and they eat in silence. 

.

          around three thirty in the morning, haku asks if he has a driver’s license. he says no, but haku lets him drive the truck anyway. he drives for nine hours, makes it all the way to the catskills, and haku sleeps in the passenger seat the whole time. sai tries not to look at him too much.

. 

          they stop at a state park. sai has never been to one on his own before, but he knows they are a good place to hide. haku doesn’t ask, so he thinks maybe he knows this too, is running from something just like sai. 

          they hike the path along a ridge, lean and hungry like a two-pack of wolves, trying on silence and jeering laughter in turns. they find a stream a few hundred yards from the path, clear and cold, blue-grey slate bedrock at the bottom. they take off their socks, their shoes, look at each other and strip off all their clothes. the water is frigid, it stings his skin and turns him lobster red, but haku does not fare much better, and the peals of laughter he gets when he submerges and comes up gasping and shrieking make the experience joyful. they come out cleaner than they went in, at least. 

          throughout this, the creeping feeling of eyes prickles his spine, as if they are watched. he ignores it, and he thinks haku does too, if the furtive glances over his shoulder are anything to go by. 

          the trail isn’t hard to find again, once they dry off and dress, and they set off once more. it’s well-worn, often traversed by people, though the season is late. they don’t pass anyone. 

           they hike too far to get back to the truck that night, so they shelter in a cave. haku carefully shows him how to set a snare, and sai shares his heavier coat that night. they sleep curled around each other, hungry and shivering and  _alive_. alive.

.

          he shakes himself awake and opens his eyes in the night – there is a shadow standing in the entrance to their cave, backlit by the moon. he blinks at it, already starting to move, but by the time he sits up it is gone into the night. haku tells him, a bit uneasily, that sometimes the silence can play tricks on your mind if you’ve never heard such deep quiet before. a wolf howls. he goes back to sleep.

. 

          in the morning, he learns to gut and clean a rabbit, to cook the greasy meat over a fire on the flat rock of the bank of another stream. he rolls up his pants and wades into the water, shows haku what he knows about water refraction, that he’s fast enough to catch a trout with his bare hands. they eat that too. 

          they wash up again in the water, their hands, their knives, their mouths, the rabbit blood quickly fading into nothing, though it stains the grey rock they had cleaned it on, entrails and bones piled neatly like an offering. they continue on up the trail. 

          sai nearly steps into a bear trap that morning, laid out in the middle of the trail and covered in scattered leaves. haku grabs him by the elbow and hauls him away, deceptively strong, his toes brushing against it set it off and it snaps shut, centimeters from cutting him open. breaking his bones. leaving him injured and stranded, miles from cell service and even further from help. 

          sai looks at haku, haku looks at sai. their eyes are alight with adrenaline, the hunger back stronger than ever, and haku bares his teeth at the treeline, a silent snarl.  _anybody this far out should know better than to leave a trap on a trail,_  he murmurs. 

          it was meant to be there, then. which means it was meant for people. sai stands, pulls haku to his feet. he feels the hair on the back of his neck prickle, and this time he doesn’t ignore it, brush it off as the creeping paranoia that’s been plaguing him for months. 

          the forest holds its breath, the birds are silent, the trees still. sai suggests,  _run_ , and they do, fleeing into the trees with the reckless laughter of the immortal youth, the grace and ease of a pair of predators. 

. 

          he loses the feeling of eyes on them, but they keep running because they can, ducking branches and leaping downed trees on light feet, blood thrumming in their ears, putting distance between them and their would-be hunter. they stop in a small clearing, where there are ropes with hanging things tied to the trees, sticks arranged in strange shapes. there are dozens of mounds.  _graves_ , haku whispers, his fierce joy gone in the face of something like this.  _shallow ones_ , sai agrees flatly, and haku gives him a look from the corner of his eye. 

          sai takes his hand and pulls him forward, into the center of the clearing, weaving between the mounds of varying ages until he comes to one that is relatively recent. he crouches in front of it, brushes some dirt away, and lifts up what he finds. a skull, long blonde hair and some wrinkled flesh still clinging to the scalp. the bone is broken, split along the eye socket and the cheekbone in a deep gash.  _an ax_ , he guesses, and haku nods. looks even more uneasy, though he suspects it’s because of his callous handling of the dead and the setting than any fear of the one that did this. 

          his voice is tight when he says,  _do you like to hunt, haku_ , as he carefully sets the skull down again, and haku’s jaw takes a stubborn slant. his eyes get flinty.  _i think i’m pretty good at it_ , he replies. sai gives him a grim smile, one that is mirrored back at him. they disappear into the forest again. 

          he never learned to track through a forest, but haku shows him – they backtrack, find the heavy bootprints of the one that’s following them. they follow each other in circles, and there are two of them but this man knows these mountains, the forest, probably grew up here, has been hunting for decades, probably, if the size of his little grave yard is anything to go by. 

          it’s starting to get dark. sai asks him if he’s ever killed anyone before, and haku stares at the darkening skies to the east grimly, and says,  _no_. 

           _i’ll do it then_. haku doesn’t react, and once again, they don’t talk about it. they devise a plan, haku to be the bait and sai to be the trap, find a narrow ravine. sai curls in a shallow hollow, knife in hand, and stretches his senses when haku disappears from sight into the forest. 

          it feels like hours later, fully dark, when he hears the pounding of footsteps in the rocky ravine below. haku is lighter, and naturally quiet, but he’s sprinting full speed in the dark over uneven ground, and sai doesn’t have it in him to wince sympathetically when his heart has stilled. haku passes him, doesn’t look over his shoulder and give him away, and the dark figure follows, heavy boots pounding like a drum in the silence of the night. 

          sai takes a leap, hits the man squarely between the shoulders with his feet, and rolls instead of landing heavily. the man does down with a grunt, comes up snarling and swinging a machete, nearly takes sai’s head off and, as it is, leaves a deep gash over his collarbone that he can’t yet feel in the face of his adrenaline rush. he redirects the next swing, throws it wide, knees the man in the gut, the diaphragm, jabs him in the tender throat with an elbow. he brings the knife up to cut him down, but the shadow has a hundred pounds and a half a foot on him, hits him so hard in the face that his head snaps back, bounces off the sheer wall of the ravine with a sickening smack. 

          there are hands at his throat, and he sinks the knife into the meat of the man’s shoulder with a snarl, unable to get to his neck. the man on top of him yowls and squeezes harder, night vision goggles making him look bug eyed and inhuman. haku appears from the shadows with his own knife, jumps on his back and gets him in between the ribs. the man rears back, trying to throw the smaller boy off, and sai takes the opening. he pulls his knife from his shoulder and slits his throat, deep enough that he can see the white gleam of bone, spraying the both of them with hot blood that gleams black in the moonlight. 

          they stare at each other for a moment, chests heaving, a cooling corpse between them. haku says,  _we need to find somewhere to stay tonight_. sai mutters,  _we need to do something with his body_. the moon shines overhead, and a pack of coyotes begins yowling in the distance. 

          sai peels off his coat, much larger and warmer than either of theirs, and then. the machete. they use it to cut the man into pieces, working around the joints like a pair of regular butchers. it takes them a long time, through the small hours of the morning and into dawn, and they scatter pieces of him through the forest as they work their way back to the ridge with the trail. 

          they don’t see anyone on the trail as they walk back to haku’s truck –  _it’s my dad’s_ , he says, and doesn’t elaborate – but they still stop to rinse off one more time in the stream, stripping the blood from their skin and trying to scrub the stiff patches from their clothes. they use the man’s coat as a shelter, hang their clothes around a fire, and freeze their asses off for one more night. this time, sai does not wake to any figures, and they leave his coat there in the morning. 

          the third? the fourth day? he’s already losing track of time, they are back to joking and shoving at each other, easier now that there isn’t a looming presence on the ridge, eyes on the backs of their necks.

.

          they change their clothes, they get into haku’s truck, and they drive back down south. haku takes him to pittsburgh, and sai leans in to kiss him at the bus station because he thinks it feels right, but haku puts a hand over his mouth and gives him a raised eyebrow, a dry,  _really_? and then his too-sharp predator grin.

          sai says, _i’ll call you_ , like haku is one of the strangers he’d hooked up with once in a bathroom. haku says, laughingly,  _i don’t have a phone_. 

                _neither do i_.

          he gets on a bus to new york, watches haku climb in his truck and head west. seems they both have places, things,  _duties_ to get back to.


End file.
